At a single press briefing on 3 September 2026, OpenAI's president made two statements: he described artificial general intelligence (Artificial General Intelligence) as a “vague grey thing” with no agreed definition, then ended the briefing with: “Welcome to the age of artificial general intelligence.” Headlines carried only the second statement and attributed it to the company. While the market focused on the phrase, the announcement's effect fell elsewhere: the Hong Kong session, which closed four and a half hours before US jobs data, and a European regulatory perimeter that had closed around ChatGPT four days before the launch. This article measures where the effect actually fell — and why the week's most important point was buried in the safety disclosure, not the phrase.
The announcement everyone read did not affect its maker. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on 3 September 2026, and headlines carried one phrase: entry into the “age of artificial general intelligence”. The phrase was indeed said — but by Greg Brockman (Greg Brockman), the company's president, in a personal capacity, at a press briefing in which he described the same concept as a “vague grey thing” with no agreed definition, then ended the session with the phrase. OpenAI's official pages do not use the phrase at all. The gap between what was said in the room and what came out of it is the first point to correct before reading any number.
More importantly, the week was not about the phrase. Four days before the launch, on 31 August 2026, the European Commission designated ChatGPT a “Very Large Online Search Engine (Very Large Online Search Engine)” under the Digital Services Act (Digital Services Act). The legal rationale matters: the service was not designated because it is AI, but because it responds to requests “including through web search” — and is therefore, in the decision's words, a “hybrid service designated as a search engine”. This is a functional, not categorical, test, which allows the perimeter to expand on its own without new legislation.
In the market, the effect fell in Hong Kong, not New York, for a timing rather than analytical reason. MiniMax rose 6.5% to HK$378 in the 4 September session, while Baidu gained 4.6% in its Hong Kong listing, Kuaishou 4.2%, JD.com 4.1%, and Xiaomi 3.9%. The US session that day was dominated by the jobs report, making it unsuitable as a judgment on the model. The sharpest point in the file is one company in two sessions: JD.com rose 4.1% in Hong Kong versus about 1.87% for its US listing on the same day — because Hong Kong closed four and a half hours before the US release. EL7 calculation
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